Answers To Unasked Questions

Imagine being a buggy whip maker 100 years ago. Orders are falling year after year as your customers are starting to buy automobiles and no longer need your product. What's the answer to your revenue drop?

Do you cut costs? Create a better buggy whip? Do you shut down? Or do you diversify into a new field, say, the burgeoning auto industry?

Answering that question now with 20/20 hindsight is easy. But flash forward to 2009. A lot of people are facing such dilemmas today. Circumstances demand that they respond quickly with answers to questions they haven't yet learned to ask.

What got me thinking about this was a recent rumor that Apple Inc. is close to introducing a "tablet." Brian Lam, who writes an astute technology blog called Gizmodo, broke the news last week in a detailed entry full of quotes from unnamed inside sources.

Whereas, Amazon.com's Kindle tablet is fairly static with limited capabilities, the Apple tablet sounds like it will be much more dynamic, more interactive and, most important, will seek to redefine print media. This will not be a Kindle copycat. Based on how Apple reinvented the music industry with iTunes and the iPod, my bet is that they'll do the same thing to print media.

Think about the state of newspapers and magazines today. Those that haven't already folded are moving in that direction. The Rocky Mountain News, one of the nation's oldest papers, shut down last spring. Just this week, Condé Nast announced that the venerable old cooking magazine, Gourmet, would soon cease publication.

According to the Oct. 7 Boston Globe, Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills buy-out firm, "broke into the news business last May, acquiring the San Diego Union-Tribune for a reported $50 million... [T]he firm's executives have turned to a familiar playbook, laying off 28 percent of the paper's employees, or 304 people, including seven of its top nine executives." Platinum, as the story notes, is rumored to be interested in buying the Globe.

Few newspapers and magazines are making a profit these days, and nearly all are laying people off, reducing the news hole, and examining every corner of their operations for potential savings. In short, the managers of this modern day buggy whip industry are trying to stay in business by producing their buggy whips more cheaply.

Apple is telling them there's another solution.

According to Gizmodo, Apple has been holding surreptitious meetings with newspaper publishers like The New York Times, textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill, and magazine publishers like Condé Nast. Lam writes:

"The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video, interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. And with release dates for Microsoft's Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static e-ink, it appears Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content."

Recall the introduction of iTunes in January 2001, which preceded the iPod. Apple introduced iTunes as a new feature of the latest iteration of its operating system, Mac OS X. Mac fans loved it immediately, uploading their music collections, which enabled them to listen to music at their desks. So when the iPod came out 10 months later, Mac owners were predisposed to buy iPods - hence, the record-setting sales year after year.

Brian Lam says in Gizmodo that Apple is talking to publishers about putting their static content on iTunes for downloading onto customers' iPhone and iPod touch. If you have one of those devices, you know that their two-by-three-inch screen is good for a lot of things, but probably not textbooks and such.

Sometime in the near future, Apple will roll out the new technology that will - guess what - perfectly suit these content providers, enable them to grow and monetize their offerings. All the while, they will be reinventing themselves in an entirely new medium, regaining their audiences by engaging them differently.

While some in the publishing industry will likely bristle at Apple's intrusion into their business - as did the music industry moguls over iTunes - the smart ones will climb aboard and move forward with this new technology.

From today's vantage point, it's difficult as outsiders for us to envision where this new technology will take us - just as we couldn't have foreseen where the iPod would go and what it would mean to professional musicians, the music industry, and music aficionados.

The answer may lie in the key phrase in the Gizmodo blog: "hybridized content." Business reporter Dan Lyons, who moonlights as "Fake Steve Jobs" in his satirical but insightful blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, writes:

"[N]ew technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That's the really exciting thing here. Not the tablet itself but what it means for news, for entertainment, for literature... There is no point in moving to digital readers if we're just going to do what we did on paper... We're talking about an entirely new way to convey information, one that incorporates dynamic elements (audio, video) with static elements (text, photos) plus the ability for the 'audience' to become content creators, not just content consumers."

If I were a reporter at a major metro daily, losing sleep and anxious about my job, I'd see this impending development as a real positive. It would certainly look more promising than the slashing and burning going on in that business now.